Build Facebook Apps in Ruby with New Heroku Package

Heroku, the new platform-as-a-service hotness in app creation, has recently announced a partnership with Facebook.

Heroku’s Ruby-focused platform is already more than 99,000 apps strong. The startup’s new Facebook App Package will help companies large and small create Facebook apps with ease, using the Facebook Graph API in Ruby.

Some of the Facebook apps already using Heroku include Clobby, the Facebook-based group chat app, and Cardinal Blue, a suite of social games.

Heroku places particular emphasis on its platform’s ability to scale rapidly — something anyone with a Facebook app idea should take into consideration. After all, when you’re launching to a network of 500 million users, you need to be prepared for the admittedly unlikely but nevertheless possible eventuality that your app will be a huge success.

Heroku also claims its platform allows for more productive development, smoother deployment and access to system components such as NoSQL databases, asynchronous workers and memcache — elements the company says “are often critical components of successful Facebook apps.”

Mike Vernal is Facebook’s director of platform. He said in a release, “Heroku makes building and scaling Facebook applications easier than ever. Developers can focus on their app, getting it in the hands of millions of Facebook users quickly.”

We name-dropped Heroku in a recent post about IDEs. As we noted, the Ruby language is growing exponentially in popularity these days, and more and more developer resources are devoted to Ruby.

For more information on how Facebook development via Heroku works, check out the documentation. The package’s suite of tools comes to $1,500 per month, a special introductory price that includes a $300-per-month discount.